Feels like almost everyone I know has crippling anxiety

[Anonymous]

First let me say this thread comes from a place of genuine curiosity and concern, not from a mean desire to gossip.

I'm defining "crippling anxiety" as anxiety that negatively impacts relationships, sleep, quality of life, often for which they're seeking medication or therapy. Obviously that's not a medical definition. I'm just distinguishing it from the nervousness I feel when giving a speech, for instance.

Of my friends: One or both members of the 5 couples in my circle have it (7 of 10).
Of my family: My mom, both cousins, ex-husband, ex-MIL, ex-SIL. I have no siblings, and ex's father is deceased, so basically that's everyone except my dad.
Of my coworkers: My boss and boss's boss and 4 of my 5 peers.

This is serious anxiety -- can't sleep for days because they're mulling over the end of the world and our purpose in it; avoiding going out in public and having panic attacks when they do; unable to drive (much less fly) because they fear crashing; alienating spouses due to their compulsive cleaning and fear of germs; etc.

Have people always been this way and we just didn't have the knowledge and tools to diagnose it as anxiety? Or is it from a change in our environment -- i.e. plastic in everything, something like that?

[Anonymous]

It’s not the norm for everyone who know to have crippling anxiety (or any other specific mental health issue to a debilitating degree). My thoughts are:
1) you may be inadvertently over exaggerating their degree of illness
OR
2) there’s something really unhealthy about the conditions under which your social circle lives.
OR
3) you have some other agenda in posting this.

[Anonymous]

I think a lot of people have underlying anxiety that they've managed to repress by staying busy. The pandemic made it so they couldn't be busy. Add that with the constant media hype over the pandemic and it caused people to spin out of control. I have anxiety and have been a nurse working on a Covid ward since the beginning (though we haven't had any cases at my hospital in 3 weeks and have less than 15 hospitalized in my entire state!). Had I not used my coping techniques my anxiety would have spiraled and I would have been like those you describe.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It’s not the norm for everyone who know to have crippling anxiety (or any other specific mental health issue to a debilitating degree). My thoughts are:
1) you may be inadvertently over exaggerating their degree of illness
OR
2) there’s something really unhealthy about the conditions under which your social circle lives.
OR
3) you have some other agenda in posting this.

Seems like #2. The groups are biased with respect to specific environments.

I honestly don't know a lot of people like OP describes. Maybe two. Both grew up with helicopter parents.

[Anonymous]

I had anxiety before moving to the DC area.
I now have crippling anxiety since living here.

When I leave and go to an area with fewer people, my anxiety reverts to "average." When I come back to the traffic and the jerks and the competitive mindset, the "crippling" part returns.

For me, the pandemic improved my anxiety because I didn't feel pressured to socialize here and felt like I could finally relax. For others, being "busy" relieves anxiety.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It’s not the norm for everyone who know to have crippling anxiety (or any other specific mental health issue to a debilitating degree). My thoughts are:
1) you may be inadvertently over exaggerating their degree of illness
OR
2) there’s something really unhealthy about the conditions under which your social circle lives.
OR
3) you have some other agenda in posting this.

OP here. As for number 2, is it that we are all UMC (by national standards; LMC by dcum standards) and therefore...what exactly? We don't exhaust our minds with manual labor? We have the awareness and money to identify it and seek mental health help?

All the people I listed have been dealing with this since long before the pandemic. The ones with existential gloom were made worse by the pandemic, those with mainly social anxiety were relieved by the pandemic, the rest stayed the same.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I think a lot of people have underlying anxiety that they've managed to repress by staying busy. The pandemic made it so they couldn't be busy. Add that with the constant media hype over the pandemic and it caused people to spin out of control. I have anxiety and have been a nurse working on a Covid ward since the beginning (though we haven't had any cases at my hospital in 3 weeks and have less than 15 hospitalized in my entire state!). Had I not used my coping techniques my anxiety would have spiraled and I would have been like those you describe.

Please list coping strategies
Thank you for all you have done.

[Anonymous]

These are anxious times

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think a lot of people have underlying anxiety that they've managed to repress by staying busy. The pandemic made it so they couldn't be busy. Add that with the constant media hype over the pandemic and it caused people to spin out of control. I have anxiety and have been a nurse working on a Covid ward since the beginning (though we haven't had any cases at my hospital in 3 weeks and have less than 15 hospitalized in my entire state!). Had I not used my coping techniques my anxiety would have spiraled and I would have been like those you describe.

Please list coping strategies
Thank you for all you have done.

I do not watch the news. I had to do this early on in the pandemic (and am still very frustrated how it was handled by the media). At the end of each day I check the Covid stats for my state. If there is anything important in the news I either see it on DCUM or DH tells me. That's probably the biggest thing.

Gratitude and centering. Forcing myself to look at the good in things helps the anxiety. When I feel anxiety coming on, I center myself. The best one for me is calming breaths and once that sets in I find 5 things I see, 4 things I can touch, 3 things I can hear, 2 I can smell, 1 can taste. By the time.im done, that panic feeling has subsided

No wallowing or what ifs. If you let your brain go down that hole it sucks you in. If I start doing that, I force myself to redirect my thought process. I do something else. I think about something else

Committing to social activities. No backing out because I'm not up for it. If I go, I'll have a good time and come back in a better mood. If I bail, I'll wallow.

[Anonymous]

I have that. I’ve always been anxious, but it got really bad when my thyroid was removed and I went on artificial thyroid hormones - usually these are well tolerated, but anytime the dosage is even slightly too much, I am prone to panic attacks.

Yeah and meditation/yoga/exercise don’t do anything. I have to adjust my thyroid dose before feeling better.

[Anonymous]

Maybe an unpopular opinion, but I grew up with a sibling who suffered severe depression (attempted suicide)...and I've also been treated clinically for depression.

I think our society is very sick emotionally, and we have little to no outlets to help people process difficult emotions. Because of this, extreme emotions fester into clinical, long-term pathologies. I think historically, more people had access to faith leaders, extended family, close knit communities to help them in times of need. This isn't to say that clinical depression and anxiety didn't exist, but, despite statistics being difficult to come by, I don't think it was as common as it is now.

I think historically we had better ways of dealing with common forms of loss and trauma, so people's responses to these things didn't result in long-term issues. Also, our healthcare system would rather medicate everything than provide things like talk-therapy and counseling. For myself, I think that if I had been provided a stronger support system to process my sibling's suicide attempt, I doubt I'd have spiraled into a deeper clinical depression. In fact, finally processing that event is what helped me, not the medications I was prescribed.

[Anonymous]

Did you miss the global pandemic? Do you have no empathy?

How nice for you that you didn’t lose anyone you loved, of COVID or of other causes where you couldn’t be with them in their final days, or give them a proper funeral.

How nice for you, that you didn’t lose your job or income.

How nice for you, that your kids adapted well to online learning.

How nice for you, that your parents aren’t in elder care facilities, and you weren’t locked away from seeing them, or only could see them through glass.

Etc.

[Anonymous]

I think keeping a tally on the exact pitch and tenor of the mental health of those around you, and then posting that list online with Rainman-like detail is a pretty solid sign of an unhealthy fixation, no?

MYOB.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I think a lot of people have underlying anxiety that they've managed to repress by staying busy. The pandemic made it so they couldn't be busy. Add that with the constant media hype over the pandemic and it caused people to spin out of control. I have anxiety and have been a nurse working on a Covid ward since the beginning (though we haven't had any cases at my hospital in 3 weeks and have less than 15 hospitalized in my entire state!). Had I not used my coping techniques my anxiety would have spiraled and I would have been like those you describe.

The pandemic actually reset me and my boundaries. It gave me a year of freedom from judgement or expectations from friends, family, and work. I've since extended that year to January 2022.

I do what I want, when I want, blow off whatever I want and it feels so damned good.

[Anonymous]

We now have names for disorders and ailments, and we are progressing to a place where there’s not as much shame/stigma/hush-hush.

In other words, the days of locking Aunt Alice away for bipolar disorder are over. Aunt Alice has bipolar disorder, she can talk about it, she can manage it with meds and therapies, and there it is.

We can talk about anxiety now. And because we have social platforms, we can even talk to people outside of our social circle about it. A friend of mine from elementary through high school suffers from depression. I haven’t seen him in 20 years, but we connect online. So I can add him to my list of “someone I know is dealing with depression,” whereas before the dawn of social, we wouldn’t have kept in touch on that level.

I usually enjoy good mental health, but this pandemic did cause me to fall into a temporary state of depression and anxiety. I am just now starting to get out of it.

Is it imagination that you lack, OP, or critical thinking skills? Or empathy? Or all three?